The Designers Who Saved Chrysler

IN the old days at the Chrysler Corporation, Michael Santoro's curve would surely have died a quick death, and for the most prosaic of reasons: lack of a hinge.

You see, the curve may have profoundly moved an artsy car designer like Mr. Santoro -- light would bounce off it prettily, and it would make the sedan feel roomier -- but to a pragmatic engineer, faced with the grittier task of freezing the design in steel and then stamping out hundreds of thousands of durable duplicates, it was a migraine. No one could remember a sedan's sides curving so sharply (both front to back, like a horseshoe, and top to bottom, like parentheses). No hinge existed that would make the doors swing properly, the engineers assigned to the project said when they saw Mr. Santoro's clay model.

That, a few years back, is where it would no doubt have ended. The engineers would have vanished with the design, and then sent it back with the curve made straighter, not incidentally putting that fast-talking New York kid in his place.

But the curve survived on the Dodge Stratus and Chrysler Cirrus compact sedans, which the company unveiled last month, accentuating a shape that provoked some rather strong reactions.

"It nearly moved me to tears," said John P. Wolkonowicz, a former product planner at the Ford Motor Company who is now senior automotive consultant for Arthur D. Little Inc. in Boston. "It's the best set of proportions I've ever seen on a sedan."

The curve survived because of a strategy Chrysler adopted in the late 1980's, as the company was sliding into yet another financial crisis: to develop designs that would make its cars as striking as possible. "Design," explains Tom Gale, the Chrysler vice president in charge of design, "can add value faster than it adds cost."

Sounds simple, but by automotive standards, and given Chrysler's parlous finances, gambling on design was like jumping with an untested bungee cord. The safe approach would have been to churn out conventional vehicles that filled a marketing niche, competed mostly on price and never risked bombing, like the Edsel or, more recently, the Chevrolet Caprice.

But thanks mostly to its design alchemy, Chrysler in less than three years has gone from being the basket case of the auto world to leading the resurgence of the American auto industry. The darling of car buyers, Wall Street and the auto enthusiast magazines, Chrysler is suddenly the most profitable auto maker in the country and the one most rapidly gaining market share.

This success has come even though the company still lags behind Ford and G.M., not to mention the Japanese, in controlling manufacturing defects, according to J. D. Power & Associates quality surveys. Just last week, for example, Chrysler recalled 115,000 1993 Jeep Grand Cherokees and Grand Wagoneers to fix a defect in the steering column. Analysts said such problems point to one long-term risk for Chrysler: If the buyers the company has successfully tempted back are disappointed with the cars' quality, they won't be fooled again.

Another question is whether Chrysler, which has already come back from the dead several times, can remain healthy. "Chrysler is terrific at adversity," Mr. Gale said. "We're not that good at success."

So far, however, buyers have been won over by the LH line of midsize cars -- the Chrysler Concorde, Eagle Vision and Dodge Intrepid -- which have sold as fast as Chrysler can make them, as have the redesigned Grand Cherokee and the Dodge Ram full-size pickup truck. The strong critical reception for the Stratus and its sister Cirrus, which begin selling in the fall, bode well for Chrysler's plan to use the cars to challenge the Honda Accord and the Toyota Camry, analysts say. Meanwhile, the design of the new Neon, a subcompact Chrysler is pushing in a Super Bowl ad campaign today, has also won critical raves. Analysts expect the Neon, which went on sale this month, to pose a serious threat to General Motors' Saturn and Honda's Civic. And Chrysler has even placed its sports car, the Viper, into a television show named for the car.

"In terms of what we used to call styling, they're probably leading the world's automobile industry," said David E. Davis, whose magazine, Automobile, named the Neon its car of the year.

How did they do it? If there is a consistent formula used by Chrysler's designers and engineers, it is to expand passenger space, lavish attention on the interior and increase the driver's feeling of control by pushing the cabin out over the front wheels, while shoving the wheels out to the corners of the car to give the sense that it clings to the road. Rather than trying to please all customers, Chrysler aimed to provoke love-it-or-hate-it reactions, since only an intense attraction was likely to draw buyers used to thinking of boxy Chryslers as toasters on wheels.

But just as important as designers' inspirations and the willingness of the company's top executives to gamble on them has been Chrysler's new process for developing vehicles. As it shifted to the design-oriented strategy, Chrysler began mimicking the Japanese approach of dividing workers into teams devoted to producing particular vehicles on a common budget, rather than separately financed departments performing one aspect of development in sequence. To help this approach along, Chrysler has been moving its product development staff into its new headquarters building in Auburn Hills, Mich., to put everyone under one roof. Committee Approach

Indeed, despite the importance of the designers' creative spark, the chief irony of Chrysler's daring designs is that they have succeeded because they were developed through committees. This is the sort of approach that auto enthusiasts always deplored because they thought it resulted in compromised, lowest-common-denominator cars. "We grump about committees, but the fact is there has to be a team," said Mr. Davis of Automobile.

The efficacy of using teams, which at Chrysler can number 700 people, has become conventional wisdom in the industry. "The product was not necessarily the master that was being served under the old system, whereas now everyone is basically accountable," said Mr. Wolkonowicz of Arthur Little.

Because it was smaller and closer to the brink financially, Chrysler switched more quickly than its domestic competitors to the team approach. But Ford has also embraced the system, and its first dividend, the new Mustang, has been a commercial and critical success. G.M., too, is trying to apply the concept, but analysts believe it lags its competitors.

At Chrysler's new design center, engineers, manufacturing specialists and even accountants review designs from the earliest days. As a result, they have more time to solve problems, like those posed by Mr. Santoro's curve. The designers have also become more sensitive to issues like manufacturability. And everyone involved has a greater desire to solve problems, in part because their careers depend on the overall success of the vehicle, rather than that of their particular piece.

So simply put, Mr. Santoro's curve survived, as did the radical elements in other recent designs, because Chrysler had decided it would. Once a "theme" is chosen, Mr. Santoro said, "there is a culture there that makes sure that the final product looks like the original design." Even the engineers who said the hinges could never be manufactured were committed to producing Mr. Santoro's design, as were Mr. Gale and the company's other top executives.

To solve the hinge problem, the team reached beyond its own members to bring in two older engineers ("two Yoda-type figures," according to Mr. Santoro) who specialized in hinge design. For three days, they puzzled on the problem, eschewing computer modeling for sketch after sketch with pencil, ruler and paper. And they came up with a solution.

Then, of course, the engineers had to find a way to make those curving windows roll down. But they were willing to try, said William A. Dayton, Mr. Santoro's boss and the design chief behind the new sedans, because they felt vested in the design, despite the old cultural barriers. A New Stretch

The radical "cab forward" look of the Chrysler cars, which other companies have experimented with over the years, is in many ways an engineering rather than a design triumph. On the Stratus and Cirrus, for example, the hood is actually wider than it is long; to permit that, the engineers first had to set a goal for themselves of packing the engine, the cooling system, the airbags and everything else that sits ahead of the driver into a much smaller space. Once the engineers, in consultation with designers, set such "stretch goals" for the skeleton of the vehicles, said Francois J. Castaing, Chrysler's engineering chief, the designers can begin sketching the skin of the vehicle.

"Between Tom Gale and I, we have an agreement that you don't design great cars by having a pure stylist isolated in a room, and he works at that for a few months, and at the end you hand it over to the engineers and manufacturing guys," said Mr. Castaing.

The fruits of this cooperation were the record earnings posted by Chrysler earlier this month -- $777 million in the fourth quarter of 1993 -- resulting in record profit-sharing checks for 65,000 employees. Chrysler gained more market share in North America in 1993 than any other auto maker, picking up 1.3 percentage points of the car and light truck market, to finish with 14.4 percent. That compared with a 0.7-point gain for Ford, to 25.4 percent, and a 0.6-point loss for G.M., to 33.1 percent, according to Ward's Automotive Reports. Peculiar Breed

Car designers are a peculiar breed -- artists who gush about Henry Moore or Martha Graham on the one hand but on the other must come up with practical devices with mass-market appeal, devices that, for mysterious reasons, they simply love.

Mr. Gale dresses and even talks like a stockbroker. But when he starts describing the look of a car -- the shapes he first doodled during class while growing up in Flint, Mich. -- his eyes light up. "Half the time to this day I can tell you by the tailights lit at night what kind of cars they are," he says.

Mr. Gale's key theme has been to strip away the gewgaws that used to adorn Chrysler vehicles -- and that most people think of when they think of design -- in favor of emphasizing unusual proportions.

"Look, I will give up the moldings and the vinyl roofs and the wire caps and the white walls and all of the nonsense, if you will, that really has no intrinsic value to the customer," Mr. Gale said. "But in exchange for that, we want the dramatic appearance, we want the larger wheels and tires, we want the wheels and tires at the corners."

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Those sorts of changes, he said, helped the company make a "structural, strategic leap" in design that other companies would take years to match. As for design elements like a neat new Chrysler molding, he said dismissively, "Ford could do that tomorrow."

As a student sitting by a seventh-floor window of New York City's High School of Art and Design, Mr. Santoro wasn't thinking about details like moldings as he stared down at the rectangular shapes of cars lined up before the red light at Second Avenue and 56th Street. "You look out the window and all the cars look the same," he said. "I said, 'If I ever get the chance, my car's going to look different from the Second Avenue view.' "

To keep pushing designs, auto makers have long focused on hiring young people like Mr. Santoro, a graduate of the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, who joined Chrysler in 1988.

Having hired them, Mr. Gale lets these young designers fail extravagantly, as Mr. Santoro did when he submitted a design for the Neon. While it looked neat on paper, he admitted, had it been turned into metal the surfaces would have been "kind of amateurish."

He applied that lesson to the Stratus design. "It was great to be able to screw up that much," he said.

As they work, designers need constantly to keep in mind a large number of variables: Does this door permit enough side-impact protection? Will too much steel be wasted if the manufacturer tries to stamp this shape? Having team members from other departments regularly reviewing their work enforces discipline on such issues, resulting in scores of compromises, some painful.

"You have to negotiate for things, design versus engineering, and sometimes you have to give something up," said David Smith, 30, who came up with the original Neon design. "That's kind of hard."

Mr. Smith said that, because it would have been too costly, he could not jazz up the rear of the Neon as much as he had hoped. "I would have liked to have seen something as unique as the front end in the rear as well, but it worked out well given the cost considerations," he said.

Some of the compromises have worked out poorly. For example, the team that brought the LH cars to market decided to save a little money by not lighting the shift indicator on the console between the seats. The decision seemed to make sense, since there was another shift indicator on the instrument panel that was illuminated. Buyers, however, have been irritated by the shadowy shifter, and the LH team, which has continued to monitor the cars' performance on the road, has made plans to add one as part of the vehicles' redesign, which has not yet been scheduled.

In general, the group approach helps preserve the designer's intent, instead of undermining it. Consider the Stratus and Cirrus headlamps. Usually, a gap separates the headlamp edges from the car's surface, so the lamp can be moved to properly align the beams on the assembly line; on the LH cars, the gap can be as wide as four-tenths of an inch. But the Stratus and Cirrus design called for a tight fit, possible only if the beams could be aligned from behind, by reaching under the hood.

Neat idea, said the team's accountants. But the cost, they said, was prohibitive -- about $80 per car, more than Chrysler spent doing them the old-fashioned way.

But as the team discussed the old headlamp approach, they discovered it had hidden costs the accountants hadn't considered. For example, at the factory, workers spent a lot of time reworking the headlamp assembly to align the lights properly. Because the resulting front ends often looked crooked to buyers, the approach also drove up warranty costs once the cars were on the road.

As they talked it over, team members found savings in its preferred approach. They also brought in the headlamp supplier -- a very unusual move so early in the process -- and bargained down the price. In the end, said Mr. Dayton, the design chief, the headlamp system cost only about $10 per car.

Without a team to come up with the solution, he said: "We just would have said, 'We can't afford it,' and stayed with the old system." WORKING ON THE INSIDE

TO Trevor M. Creed, Chrysler's British-born head of interior design, little things mean an awful lot. Take American turn signals, which he first encountered when the Ford Motor Company brought him to the United States as a designer in 1982.

"I couldn't get over the effort required on the turn signal," he recalled. "I kept thinking, 'Maybe this is why Americans don't bother to use turn signals.' "

In 1985, Mr. Creed jumped to Chrysler, where he discovered that interior design had deteriorated so far that the company was considering using identical instrument clusters in all its cars and trucks. With budgets tight, interior design was first to suffer -- a foolish strategy, Mr. Creed argued, since the interior is where people pass most of the time they spend with their cars and trucks.

According to analysts, that insight, and the often-subtle changes to interiors that have flowed from it, have been an important part of Chrysler's new appeal to buyers.

Mr. Creed began asking some basic questions, like why does the interior of an American car have to be shiny? "European and Japanese cars all had a much lower gloss level," he said. "Low gloss level is synonymous with quality and good fit and finish. And traditionally, American interiors were shiny and greasy looking." So Chrysler's LH cars are positively dusky inside.

Similarly, the controls of Japanese and European cars had a silky feel.

One reason Chrysler's controls were so clunky, Mr. Creed discovered, was that the company never asked its suppliers for anything different. Specifications for a switch, for example, included "all sorts of written things that it has to meet, like it must function 5,000 times at this degree temperature, etc. and etc.," he said. But "there was never a paragraph that said, 'It shall feel like magic.' "

To demonstrate what they meant, Chrysler designers began mounting Honda and Toyota switches, levers and dials on wooden blocks, then asking suppliers to flick, click or twist them.

And the car and truck development teams began paying attention to whether suppliers delivered the magic they requisitioned. Recently, a Dodge Stratus, Honda Accord and Toyota Camry sat side-by-side in a brightly lit room at the Chrysler Technology Center in Pontiac, Mich. Members of the Stratus team climbed in and out of the cars, bouncing on seats, opening and shutting glove compartments, slamming doors.

The Stratus is supposed to be Chrysler's Japan-beater, so the team members meet weekly to see if the bits and pieces of their car measure up to the bits and pieces of the competition that serve as their benchmarks.

The good news this week is that, as they previously requested, the oil dipstick has been lowered slightly so that it no longer hits the prop rod. The bad news is that the hazard light button feels "notchy" -- it doesn't go up and down smoothly.

Marc Seguin, from program management, poses an existential question: "What do we want out of the switch?"

Ron Dean, from vehicle development, gives him a down-to-earth answer. "This is the target right here," he says, indicating the Accord. "It should feel like that." Mr. Seguin climbs in and pumps the Honda's hazard button. "Well," he says, "it doesn't."